The late Steve McQueen, who died in 1980 at the age of 50, was the quintessentially cool movie star who oozed charisma and a magnetic screen presence in a succession of apparently effortless performances.
Four of McQueen's movies are featured in a short season at the IFC in Dublin next weekend, beginning on Saturday afternoon with Norman Jewison's original 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which McQueen and Faye Dunaway play the most erotic chess game in cinema history.
The season also includes an earlier Jewison film, The Cincinnati Kid (1965) in which McQueen memorably played a young stud poker gambler coming up against a card-shark played by the formidable Edward G. Robinson; Peter Yates's superb, highly influential Bullitt (1968), with McQueen at the wheel (and refusing to accept a stunt double) for a long, riveting car chase through the sloping streets of San Francisco; and Franklin Schaffner's rather ponderous Devil's Island prison yarn, Papillon (1973), in which McQueen is teamed with Dustin Hoffman.